Chile’s New President Makes Chapel At Presidential Palace Center Stage
SANTIAGO, Chile — The Catholic chapel inside La Moneda presidential palace took center stage in the life of the Chilean government house.
President José Antonio Kast, 60, who took office on March 11, requested to have Masses celebrated there four days a week, increasing the number from one each week under previous administrations. He, and especially his wife, First Lady María Pía Adriasola, are often seen early in the morning at the chapel, where Masses is celebrated at 7:45 a.m. from Tuesday to Thursday and at 12:30 p.m. on Fridays.
Kast won on his third presidential bid, representing the Republican Party, a conservative party he founded in 2019 after leaving Chile’s traditional right-wing coalition in 2016. The son of German immigrants from Bavaria, he is the youngest of 10 siblings. He married Adriasola, who is one of eight, and together they have nine children.
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They are members of the Schoenstatt Family Institute, one of the most committed branches of the Catholic movement founded in Germany by Father Joseph Kentenich in 1914. The couple chose Schoenstatt priest Mariano Irureta to serve as chaplain at La Moneda during the administration’s four-year term.
Their religiosity contrasts with that of Kast’s predecessor, former president Gabriel Boric, a Catholic who rarely went to church. They also moved into La Moneda, marking the first time in nearly 70 years that a president and his spouse have resided there.
From a younger generation than Kast, Boric took office in 2022, when he was just 36. He ran for president as part of the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio, which later became a formal political party. His political career began while he was a law student at the University of Chile, leading protests that reached their peak in 2011. He came to power with a group of others in their 30s and 40s. This group had little connection to the church, even though some came from Catholic schools or families, like Boric himself, whose mother is also a member of the Schoenstatt movement.
“The day after taking office, Boric held an ancestral prayer ceremony in the courtyard of La Moneda Palace,” said Dr. Manfred Svensson, a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Munich. Every leader arrives with a set of ideals and beliefs. The incoming leader has more articulated beliefs and speaks more about them, demonstrating that his Catholic identity is central to him.”
Kast was more outspoken about his faith in his previous attempts to run for president. In the 2025 campaign, for example, he favored subjects such as safety, immigration and economic growth over family values and education — topics he was involved in when he was a congressman between 2002 and 2018.
“People didn't choose Kast because he is a Catholic conservative, but they did choose him knowing that he is a Catholic conservative,” said Svensson.
Kast won with 58% of the vote, beating communist candidate Jeannette Jara, a former minister of Labor during the Boric administration.
When Kast went to La Moneda for the first time as president-elect, he visited the chapel after meeting with Boric. The chapel is the only space in La Moneda that remains in the same location as in the original plans of the Roman architect Gioacchino Toesca, who designed the building to house the mint during the colonial era. Inaugurated in 1805, the building became the house of government and the residence of the head of state in 1846.
The number of people who identify as Catholics in Chile has decreased to 54% in 2024 from 70% in 2002, according to census data. Despite this decline, at La Moneda, priests have remained active. The presence of a new president, howeverm marks the beginning of a new era for the historic chapel, which in the 19th century witnessed how attending Mass at the presidential palace was both an important political and social event.
Located on the first floor of the building, the chapel seats 60 people. On April 28, some 25 people, including the first lady, attended Mass. Some were new government workers. During the ceremony, attendees sang religious songs.
The chapel has a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the patron saint of Chile, on loan from the Cathedral of Santiago. It also has relics of Saint Theresa of the Andes and Saint Alberto Hurtado, both Chilean saints, and large 19th-century paintings brought from Quito, with scenes from the lives of Dominican saints. La Moneda was declared a national monument in 1951.
“The chapel is listed in the heritage inventory of La Moneda,” said Nicolás Viel, a priest at La Moneda during 2022 and 2023. “To remove or add anything, you have to request permission from the palace heritage department. If I wanted to put another image of the Virgin, I couldn't. What’s in there cannot be touched.”
Viel, who studied law at the University of Chile before becoming a priest, participated in the student movements of the second half of the 2000s, becoming friends with some of the people who accompanied Boric in his presidential campaign. When Boric was elected, he asked Viel to become the chaplain at La Moneda.
Viel continued the tradition of celebrating Mass only on Fridays, as was done during the administration of former President Sebastián Piñera. He also used to spend every Tuesday at the palace providing spiritual support to government workers.
“I was very proactive. I would go to the different workplaces, stop by to say hello, have breakfast with the waiters, then go down to the workers’ workshop, and in the afternoon spend time with the drivers. I did what a priest should do in a neighborhood: reaching out to different groups,” he said.
La Moneda has some 600 workers, who work for the presidency or one of the four ministries located in the building. It also has a live-in police staff.
Since the government officials who came with Boric were distant from the Catholic Church, Viel invited communities from poor neighborhoods to attend Mass on Fridays.
“These Masses brought life to the chapel, and the palace staff began to enjoy them because they found them more lively,” he said.
He also invited the parents of a waiter who were celebrating their wedding anniversary, had a blessing of the rings for a palace policewoman and her fiancé who were about to be married, led special masses when police officers were killed.
“On the one month anniversary of a police officer’s death, I would offer that Mass at La Moneda palace for the family. The then-general director of the police was very grateful. It was significant for the institution,” Viel added.
Boric used to arrive at the end of the Mass to greet the families, he recalled.
In addition to a Catholic priest, La Moneda has an evangelical chaplaincy under a pastor since 2001 and a Jewish one under a rabbi since 2012. During the Boric administration, the rabbi experienced tensions with the president, who spoke out against Israel in support of Palestine in the Gaza war.
You can read the following story in Spanish here.
Graciela Ibáñez is a journalist with a Master of Arts from Columbia Journalism School, where she graduated in 2008. She works as a professor of journalism at Universidad Gabriela Mistral and at Universidad Viña del Mar in Chile. She covers Chile for foreign media outlets, including TRT World, Americas Quarterly and The Art Newspaper. She worked as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires and REDD Intelligence in Santiago and for Debtwire in New York City. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Viña del Mar.